It's generally taken as good advice for parents to not rely on their children for emotional support ie: preferring unidirectional emotional regulation as opposed to co-regulation. Emotional co-regulation is seen as being as placing undue burdens on children. Is that what you were referring to or is it something else?
I think parent means something more like "I've faced these problems in the past so I can relate to you" instead of dumping current problems. I guess there is an awkward area where the parent has serious current problems because, as you say, burdening their child with that is also an issue.
It's funny. I read it in an entirely different way.
The way I took it was an invitation to share rather than some expectation or requirement. To me the author regrets having never been asked this question during childhood and learned the lesson, "Take time to ask open-ended questions." I didn't read it as, "demand access to your child's inner thoughts," but I find it interesting that you did.
There certainly are parents who do demand access to their children's inner thoughts l, but I didn't interpret the author as being one of them.
It seems we agree that this behavior from parents is bad, but disagree that the author is advocating for it.
You do you, but how else is a parent's question to be taken? I've never had any interest in sharing the depths of my life with my parents, and I'm in my late 40s. That's not because they're bad people; they're not. But they have always kept their life before me separate from their life after me, and I think that's a two-way street.
I don't need to know about how they hoovered up lines of cocaine and went to fetish parties (I don't really think they did either, but it could have happened and I'd never have known), and they don't need to know what I do with my spare time.
Process of elimination is a very poor strategy for explaining other's behavior. Worse, much worse, than chance in my experience. I find even random selection to be better at behavior explanation over process of elimination.
Among all of the behavioral explaination tactics, I've found asking people to have the best predictive power. To that effect, you would have to ask those parents.
